My work attempts to accent and examine fields of emergence. I’m concerned with how categories such as ‘body,’ ‘language’ and ‘vision’ are often presupposed in contemporary culture, and want to foster greater dialogue around these complex systems and their relationships to affect and meaning-making.

I hope to intercept taken for granted concepts by refiguring fixed subject / object hierarchies as unexpected and dynamic encounters. Central to my work are the feedback loops between our experience of the world (via embodiment and perception, for example), our movements within it (through performance and performative acts), and our understandings of it (in language and signs).

And so my practice uses ‘per-formance’ to interrogate ‘pre-formism.’ By engaging with the unfinished and in process within my work, I seek to challenge the nature of what is ‘given’. I use the multi-sensory, modular and generative possibilities that the digital provide, alongside and intertwined with the rich historical practices of traditional media, to explore inauguration and incipience. While my interactive spaces ask viewers to investigate performance in their own gestures, my other work weaves together a wide variety of art-making tools, performative writing and found materials to produce videos, public interventions and prints that pose questions about how and what we perform in the everyday. Here, the ‘work’ is in unpacking, problematizing and making strange.

For example, I might attempt to blur the lines between artwork and audience through pieces that are only realized in the presence of both. In my interactive environment, enter:hektor, participants use their bodies to chase after hektor’s words: they must literally move, bend, extend and stretch to capture and trigger his continuously mobile phrases, and hear what he and they will say, together. How the projected interface works is transparent and easy to understand, but the performance it engenders is often alien to those involved. Inspired by JL Austen’s speech acts, here saying and doing, affection and reflection, become one and the same.

stuttering uses an interface that instead compels participants to stutter with their bodies. An awkward piece saturated with activation points, its viewers must listen and negotiate carefully, even cautiously, shifting between intention and passivity. In order to make sense of the potential barrage of spoken word, they move in ways they normally wouldn’t, and through this, experience communication and embodiment as difficult and non-transparent.

And with step inside, participants make visual and aural images appear through their echoed footsteps and the shapes they create with their bodies. Contact microphones in the floor actuate a live video feed of their profiled silhouettes filled with ‘white noise.’ Cocooned in an interactive box with a two-sided screen, they are cut off from the rest of the gallery, with only their delicate and playful interactions projected outward. As participants learn to adapt their movements and manipulate the audio-visuals they produce, they become a collage in motion, performing the self for an unseen audience.

For my Compressionism series of prints, I strap a custom-made scanner appendage and battery pack to my body, and perform images into existence. I might scan in straight, long lines across tables, tie the scanner around my neck and swing over flowers, do pogo-like gestures over bricks, or just follow the wind over water lilies in a pond. The dynamism of my relationship to the landscape is transformed into beautiful and quirky renderings, which are re-stretched and colored on my laptop, then produced as archival art objects using photographic or inkjet processes. I also often take details from these images and iteratively re-make them as traditional prints: lithographs, etchings, engravings and woodcuts, among others. Compressionism follows the trajectory of Impressionist painting, through Surrealism to Postmodernism, but rather than citing crises of representation, reality or simulation, my focus is on performing all three in relation to each other.

My affectionately titled non-aggressive narrative video collections and net.art - such as the odys series and hektor.net - are monologues in a performative writing style, where I use technologies unique to digital video and the web in order to play with reference, allusion and navigability. Each set or site collectively explores storytelling and memory, multiplicity and identity, anger and trauma, and the labors of communication. These narratives are built by the listener, according to the pieces and pages they have seen, in what context, and in which order.

This kind of play on traditional storytelling goes hand in hand with my collaborative multimedia physical theatre performances. But works like the double room and Petra often have more explicit sociopolitical messages, such as challenging the discourse surrounding HIV/AIDS in South Africa by highlighting the reification of the diseased.

For my ongoing series of generative video works, I use simple formulas to edit and compress popular movies, revealing secret biases, hidden meanings and complex relationships just below the surface. In at interval, for example, I removed all dialogue from Woody Allen’s ‘Annie Hall’, leaving only 13 minutes of stutters, gasps, and oral fumbles. Here, I’m citing the in-betweens, accenting the impossibilities within language.

And finally, my public interventions are currently realized as architectural structures made of rope, built to scale and held up by live performers. These are ephemeral arrangements that, nonetheless, carve out space and frame their contexts. They twist the idea of ‘public place’ by their double activation: first, through the volunteers who stretch the forms outward and around them; and second, through the communal play of the onlookers-turned-participants, who give the pieces a performative turn.

Academic inquiry and writing are also essential parts of my practice. The art and research PhD I’m currently working towards at Trinity College takes on Brian Massumi’s task of putting “movement, sensation, and qualities of experience” back into our understandings of embodiment without “contradicting the very real insights of poststructuralist cultural theory,” but puts it in an arts-production context: “How might the body’s continuity, and its potential disruption, be attendant, provoked and contextualized in contemporary art?”

Through performance, provocation and play, my work seeks to infold that which is relational. I invite viewers to explore, to embody, and to re-imagine, spaces of emergence.

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